"In the early days of the World Wide Web in the first half of the 1990s, an important part of web pages belonged to students or teachers with a UNIX account in their university. System administrators of such systems installed an HTTP server pointing its root directory to the directory containing the users accounts. On UNIX, the base directory of an account is called 'home' and the HOME environment variable contains its path (for example /home/my_username). The URL of the home page usually has the format https://example.edu/~my_username/. Thus the term home page appeared and then spread to its current usage. A personal home page historically has served as a means of self-portrayal, job-related presentation, and pure enjoyment, giving way to professional advancement and social interaction. Owing to the rise of social media sites, personal home pages are no longer as common as during the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s."Back in the real world, the word "home" means many things to many people. For some, it evokes memories of the building, neighborhood, town, or city in which they were raised.
For people whose childhoods were damaged by domestic violence or being kicked out of their homes by homophobic parents, memories of a broken home are not easily repaired. Conversely, those whose careers keep them on the road as professional consultants, entertainers, flight crews, and politicians may regard such temporary contemporary homes as customized tour buses, corporate hotel suites, or Airbnb rentals as adaptations which allow so-called "road warriors" to make the best of an itinerant lifestyle.
For seniors living in an old apartment house (as well as those leaving their long-time residence to move to a new community or assisted-living facility), the intimate emotions they feel for their home are often voiced with poignancy and tenderness.
As Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s outgoing artistic director, Tony Taccone, prepares to turn over the company’s artistic leadership to his successor, Johanna Pfaelzer, he notes that:
“I am suddenly overtaken by the awareness that for the last 35 years, the place I have spent the greatest percentage of my time is this theatre. I have spent more waking hours within the campus of Berkeley Rep than I have in any domestic dwelling. While I have never slept at the theatre (nor have I ever wanted to), it is the home of my waking dreams where I have watched hundreds of imaginary worlds constructed, hundreds of ‘homes’ built and then torn down, where my life (both conscious and dreaming) has intersected with the lives of my fellow workers. My attachments here run very deep into the wellspring of my past and the trajectory of who I aspire to be. Thanks for letting me share the house with you.”
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| Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Tony Taccone (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The remarkable achievements and bittersweet final months of Taccone's leadership are beautifully captured in a piece of "wordless theatre" conceived by Geoff Sobelle who, as an aspiring magician growing up in Los Angeles, joined The Magic Castle and Society of American Magicians Hall of Fame and Magic Museum long before training at the famed Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, working as a company member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company from 2001 to 2012, and becoming co-artistic director of the absurdist theatre company Rainpan 43. A piece of performance art which constantly evolves with the seamless fluidity of a lava lamp to an enticing musical score by Elvis Perkins, HOME begins on a relatively bare stage where anything can (and does) happen.
Not only does a house materialize out of nowhere (with a bizarre collection of people popping in and out of closets, walls, bathtubs, and stoves), much of HOME is fascinating to watch. Imagine the whimsy of Cirque du Soleil combined with the Fellini-like segments frequently found in one's waking dreams and you'll get an inkling of the sheer quality of stagecraft behind all of HOME's distractions. But, as Stefanie Sobelle (Geoff’s sister and dramaturg) explains, there is much more happening than the audience realizes.
“Over the last two years of working on this project, Geoff and I have often turned to Richard McGuire’s graphic book (“Here”) in which each spread features the same corner of an ordinary living room in an ordinary New Jersey house, set over millennia (long before and long after the house’s construction). Here raises important issues regarding the relationship between an individual life and the vastness of deep time. One of its key features is that each spread is captioned with a year (2014, for example) and then punctuated with boxes that open into other years, other centuries. McGuire’s dwellers make love, grow old, grow ill. New residents move in (not all human). As such, Here emphasizes the reiterations of living that occur within a house -- the echoes of private lives with each other over time. We live with ghosts of the past and the future, McGuire suggests. We live with the mammals that we have displaced and the insects that remain. Domestic time transcends an individual’s life span entirely. Domestic time is not some rectilinear experience but rather an experiment in simultaneity and repetition, much like a dance (a tango, perhaps) with new dancers looping in and out of its choreography.”
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| Ching Valdes-Aran in a scene from HOME (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“This notion of such ‘replacement’ in and out of time is in the foundation of HOME, both in terms of the work’s form and its content. Performers replace each other. Objects replace each other. Characters replace each other. We are always re-placing, finding place again. We turn our dwelling places into something new through construction, restoration, and destruction. Places are always fleeting. We are, in a sense, all guests in the residences we inhabit. Whether through imperialism, gentrification, migration, aging, death, et al., we take the places of one another, another takes the place of us and, for better or worse, we re-place.”
Directed by Lee Sunday Evans (with choreography by David Neumann), Sobelle's production relies on the intricacy of Steven Dufala's scenic design, Karen Young's costumes, Steve Cuiffo's illusions, Brandon Wolcott's excellent sound design, and Christopher Kuhl's dynamic lighting. In addition to Geoff Sobelle and Elvis Perkins, the tightly-knit ensemble includes Sophie Bortolussi, Jennifer Kidwell, David Rukin, Justin Rose, and Ching Valdes-Aran.
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| Geoff Sobelle and Sophie Bortolussi in a scene from HOME (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“For me, the best theatre comes from watching people’s behavior. The theatre I end up making is more zoological than dramatic,” stresses Sobelle. “I love the people that I perform with (the actors I’ve brought on are Swiss Army knife actors who can do anything) and we are a kind of family. It’s very intimate; each person’s notion of ‘house and home’ is so specific. It is a personal trace that makes each of us who we are. I feel at home in the theatre itself (doing all the rituals of putting on a show) and, while the theater is a kind of home, I also feel at home on tour. I think people who are sailors might have this feeling with boats on the water.”
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| Elvis Perkins and Geoff Sobelle in a scene from HOME (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
As much as I was charmed by the performances in HOME (especially the segment in which David Rukin portrays a young teenager trying to sneak as many sips of wine as possible in the midst of a huge party), about 80 minutes into Sobelle's 105-minute show, the air starts to leak out of his balloon's magic. While I understood the motivation behind the dramatic turn of events, I found the change in pace and direction a bit of a letdown.
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| David Rukin in a scene from HOME (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Here's why: In order to draw more people into the HOME experience, members of Sobelle's ensemble move out into the audience where they start recruiting people to help string up party lights, share some wine, and join the actors onstage. While the audience can see the cast whispering stage directions to their new recruits, the stage becomes overcrowded, causing the action to slow. The experience begins to feel bloated until the crowd seems clumsy and the party's energy dissipates. Although it's clear that death is waiting in the wings for at least one person, a great deal of dramatic momentum evaporates into thin air (not everyone reacted the same way I did -- many audience members were elated by the mere thought of partying).
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| Jennifer Kidwell in a scene from HOME (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Performances of HOME continue through April 21 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
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